Put your own house in order

You know how when people are coming over - say, the inlaws - you have to scramble to get the house clean enough that your guests won't suspect how much you like to wallow in your own filth?  Not you of course, but YOU.  Every YOU except for you.  You keep an immaculate house, and can always find a pair of socks in the morning before work, and never have to stumble around in the dark while shining your phone's screen into the sock drawer and trying not to wake up your dear insomniacial spouse in the process.  Who does that kind of thing?  Probably the same kind of person who has to scramble to get the house clean enough to receive visitors while retaining dignity.  Me, in other words.

I think I've lost the plot here.  I was working a metaphor..

Ah yeah - getting the house clean.  Preparing for adoption is like that, except for your entire life.  You have to scramble to get everything in order, and provide documents proving that it is in order.  It's like scrambling to clean the house when the inlaws are coming over, and the inlaws are health inspectors and they're going to run bacterial cultures on the kitchen counters and toilet handle.  For the purposes of this metaphor, the toilet handle is your financial records.

The worst part of this metaphor is that it refuses to remain entirely metaphorical - while we do in deed have to clean the financial toilet handle, we must also clean the real one.  And so too, the real not metaphorical garage and office.

I have concluded in working to put these into an inlaw-worthy state that we have far too much crap.  Who bought this stuff?  I want somebody to blame who isn't me.

I think the garage had become an ecosystem.  Life of a sort was emerging from the primordial clutter.  What we thought of as only junk and cardboard boxes, magazines and milk jug tops, scrap wood, clothes hangers, random shoes, broken lamps - these simple things had become part of something much greater, a complex system in which the first inklings of new forms of life had begun to emerge, before I swept in like the death of dinosaurs, and sundered the world of the protoclutteroids.

I'm already seeing the good come from all this effort though.  It is hard to deny the cleaned out garage and office isn't marvelous.  Getting rid of stuff is bringing me more pleasure than accumulating it.  And I well recognize that we're a happier and saner and more creative family when our space is freed from clutter and creatively arranged.  

In a way, Baby to Be is already making our lives better.